Stability AI’s legal win over Getty leaves copyright law in limbo

Stability AI, the creator of popular AI art tool Stable Diffusion, was largely victorious against Getty Images on Tuesday in a British legal battle over the material used to train AI models. The case originally looked set to produce a landmark ruling on AI and copyright in the UK, but it landed with a thud and failed to set any clear precedent for the big question dividing AI companies and creative firms: whether AI models need permission to train on copyrighted works.

The case, first filed in 2023, is the first major AI copyright claim to reach England’s High Court, though the verdict offers little clarity to other AI companies and rightsholders. Getty had originally pursued the core issue of training on copyrighted material but dropped it mid-trial, largely due to weak evidence.

Getty, which has a large archive of images and video, sued Stability in 2023 for “unlawfully” scraping millions of images to train its software. In her ruling, high court judge Joanna Smith did find in Getty’s favor that Stability had infringed its trademark by creating images that feature its watermarks. Smith rejected Getty’s claim of secondary copyright infringement as “Stable Diffusion does not store or reproduce” any copyrighted works.

Getty will hope for a stronger result in its favor in an ongoing case against Stability in the US, which it originally filed in Delaware shortly after the UK case in 2023. It voluntarily dismissed and refiled in California this August. 

Its lawsuits are among many copyright cases between AI companies and creative firms over how generative models are made. Anthropic recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of authors and Universal Music dropped its copyright claims against AI startup Udio as part of a strategic deal to launch an AI music making platform.